{"id":1539742,"date":"2025-06-04T01:20:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T05:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1539742"},"modified":"2025-06-04T01:20:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T05:20:00","slug":"us-still-prosecuting-former-isis-members-after-officially-embracing-one-in-damascus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/us-still-prosecuting-former-isis-members-after-officially-embracing-one-in-damascus\/1539742\/","title":{"rendered":"US Still Prosecuting Former ISIS Members After Officially Embracing One In Damascus"},"content":{"rendered":"

US Still Prosecuting Former ISIS Members After Officially Embracing One In Damascus<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

This week a 49-year-old naturalized American citizen has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison<\/strong>, after confessing to traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Lirim Sylejmani pled guilty to terrorism charges in December, and was sentenced by a federal court on Monday.\u00a0 Sylejmani had attended an ISIS training camp <\/strong>beginning in November 2015, after moving from Kosovo to Syria with an intent to joint the terror group.\u00a0“The defendant will spend a decade in prison thinking about the betrayal to this country<\/strong>,” US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in\u00a0a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Illustrative: ISIS terrorist on top of abandoned Syrian jet, via BBC\/Getty Images<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

UPI writes<\/a> that “Prosecutors said he changed his name to Abu Sulayman al-Kosovi and trained alongside other recruits to be an ISIS soldier following his arrival in the Middle Eastern country. His training included instruction on using AK-47 rifles, PK machine guns, M-16 rifles and grenades<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n

According to the Defense Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When the Kosovo-native was 23, he found refuge in the United States after fleeing a genocidal regime<\/strong>. Sixteen years later, he decided to join one.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sulejmani is one of hundreds of American citizens believed to have joined Islamic State<\/strong> in Iraq and Syria since 2014. But as the Trump administration\u00a0transfers<\/a>\u00a0dozens of high-priority ISIS suspects from makeshift prisons across northeast Syria as U.S. troops levels draw down<\/strong>…<\/em><\/p>\n

But the unspoken irony and contraction here is that he had joined the Syrian battlefield at a time the West was “looking the other way” as\u00a0thousands of international jihadists joined the fight to topple Assad<\/strong> (a fight that the CIA and Pentagon were supporting covertly<\/a>). NATO member Turkey had essentially opened the border, a ‘jihadi highway’ into Syria as part of the covert effort to overthrow the Syrian government.<\/p>\n

The other irony is that the US has just embraced Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani), who himself was at one point early in the Syrian proxy war a\u00a0personal emissary of ISIS terror chief\u00a0Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Apparently some kinds of terrorism are OK, according to Washington’s regime change playbook…<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Jolani is also well-known for being the founder of Syria’s initial al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al Nusrah, which has since morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which rules from Damascus in the wake of Assad’s overthrow in December. HTS has even spent a long time on the US terrorism list<\/a>, though the $10 million bounty which had been on Jolani’s head has recently been removed by the FBI and US Treasury.<\/p>\n

As for Sulejmani, he had long been held\u00a0in an prison near Hasakah run by the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)<\/strong>. Thousands of suspected ISIS fighters were held there for years, amid efforts to send foreign fighters to their respective home countries for prosecution.<\/p>\n

Lirim Sulejmani, via The Defense Post<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sulejmani had actually asked to be deported to Kosovo, due to it being largely Islamic and a small country, but that didn’t happen. Kosovo was recognized as a nation by the Bush administration, after it was forcibly peeled away from Serbian control following years of war as well as NATO military intervention.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Syrian AQ founder al-Sharaa is planning to travel to New York in December to address the United Nations…<\/p>\n

\u201cModerated\u201d Al Qaeda leader to address UN General Assembly in New York in September.<\/p>\n

What a time to be alive.
https:\/\/t.co\/uQOil90Mxl<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) June 3, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

Confused Americans might rightly be asking: what was 20 years of the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) really all about? What was it all for?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nTue, 06\/03\/2025 – 21:20<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/geopolitical\/us-still-prosecuting-former-isis-members-after-embracing-one-damascus<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US Still Prosecuting Former ISIS Members After Officially Embracing One In Damascus This week a 49-year-old naturalized American citizen has been sentenced to a decade…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1539743,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1539742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1539743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}